2012 I really wanted to like this movie. Everything started out great too. A blockbuster, huge budget, wall-to-wall special effects. Plus I like John Cusack a lot, and Amanda Peet is fine. Woody Haralson plays another freakish crazy guy. Makes me think he is probably a freakish crazy guy in real life.
I assume you all know the plot: The world is ending because the Mayan Calendar says it has to.
Sidebar: I believe I wrote an IGM about this previously, but just in case there is someone in the world who didn’t read it, let me repeat. The Mayan calendar does not end on December 21,2012. It resets. The calendar is circular, cyclic, which is why they carved it as a series of concentric wheels, on round stones. So rather than that date being the end of the world, it is only the end of a specific period, an era. There are several million Mayans, mostly in Guatemala, who aren’t worried about it. But there will be some crazies taking it seriously. So stay away from hilltops and kool-aid.
Now back to our review. There are no surprises in this movie, and no one expected there would be. It’s all about the action, suspense and effects—which are breath-taking. And for the first two hours it succeeds brilliantly in giving us what we paid for. The story follows Cusack, a divorced writer who is trying to keep some kind of relationship with his two kids. The writing isn’t going so well, despite his first book having just been published, and he is driving a limo to make ends meet. He has to use the longcar to take his kids to Yellowstone, which as we all know, is the world’s biggest active volcano. (See my IGM titled Yellowstone: The Real End of the World). Yellowstone—apparently only an hour or so from LA by limo—is where Cusack meets Haralson who is broadcasting remotely from an RV, exposing all the secrets the worlds governments have been keeping concerning the end of the world. Something about the molten core heating up and spinning faster resulting in the curst breaking loose and going through some radical rearrangements. (See my IGM entitled The Treadmill Theory of Geological Relocation: A Creative Extrapolation of the Plate Tectonic Theory). The governments have known about the whole thing for a few years and have secretly been building “Arks” in which a few hundred thousand selectees will ride out the apocalypse based on their political juice and/or their ability to offer truly prodigious bribes. Cusack finds out about it and decides to get his family and get them onto one of the ships. Easier said than done, especially when Southern California has decided to become North Dakota.
For the next hour and a half our heroes miraculously miss being killed in interesting ways mostly involving large pieces of the planet falling on them, while they make their ways unerringly to China under less than plausible circumstances. But hey, it’s all in the script, right? It’s fun and exciting, get’s the blood up; in other words, doing exactly what we paid for. But then it doesn’t end. It goes on for another half hour (About 2 hours 40 minutes, total) and falls into a dreary, hackneyed, morass of the worst kind of melodrama. It’s as if there was a huge safe somewhere in Hollywood where every cliché in the history of cinema is kept and the writers and director got into that safe and used every one of them all at once. In a nightmare of professional idiocy, the movie leaves the world of the merely implausible and makes itself at home in the world of “who the hell wrote this slop? Kim Jong il?”
They tried to tug at our heart strings. Which works a time or two, when intelligently done, with some semblance of restraint. But this was like the Olympic Gold Medalist of over-doing it—the super-tsunami of “oh, please!”
I went in fully prepared to maintain a healthy dose of “willing suspension of disbelief,” (Which I’m really good at) but it beat me. It finally became a parody of itself. The worst stereotype since Armageddon.
It’s rated PG-13. The usual end-of-the-world mayhem and destruction. It will quicken your pulse, no doubt about it. But if you decide to see it, be sure to get a lobotomy-to-go first.
